MacFarlane debuts latest book, 'Swirling Currents'

Friday

ORLEANS -- Sandy MacFarlane is all done rowing forward and looking backward, as she’s now caught by swirling currents.

The former Orleans shellfish biologist and conservation administrator just finished her third and most ambitious book since retiring in 1998.

"Rowing Forward" was her first, essentially a look back on her Orleans days working with shellfish, the second, "Tiggie," was a biography of Charles “Tiggie” Peluso, an 80-year-old fisherman co-written with the man himself, and "Swirling Currents" casts a much wider net, as it were.

“When I was working in Orleans I was sort of the go-to person working in town, for questions about the marine world,” MacFarlane explained. “I realized there was a disconnect between what people perceive when they look at water from the land and the reality of what lies beneath. And I realized every time there is a headline about the marine environment there is a back story to it that brought us to this point. It might be good to look at it from a historic and practical perspective.”

She’s lived her life beside the ocean and on it. In the early 1980s she drove the town’s Clambulance (a reclaimed ambulance) about the Cape, raised tiny quahogs in washtubs from spat in a laboratory next to the Orleans Inn and deposited and monitored shellfish all over town. But grappling with all the issues now consuming the sea, from sharks to cod, to warming waters and wind farms was a big fish to swallow.

“This one took very long time. It was challenging to focus it and figure out which direction I wanted to go,” she said. “It’s answering the questions I’ve been asked all these years and figuring a way to get difficult information across in a readable manner and I think it came out well. Anybody can read this one. I tried to give the stories behind the headlines and to provide some hope for the future and to see where we’re headed.”

MacFarlane divided the book into three parts covering marine mammals (whales, dolphins and seals) as well as the endangered sea turtles that wash up on Cape Cod Bay beaches, the history and problems besetting the shellfish and fishing industries, and finally the effects of changing climate and ocean conditions.

While the focus is on Cape Cod the controversies are more widespread.

“You can drop another place in place of Cape Cod and have similar problems but these are problems the Cape sees before everyone else does because of the geography of where the Cape is,” MacFarlane explained. “That’s due to the fact that the Cape is the dividing line between northern and southern species and other big biogeographical boundaries between Cape Hatteras and the Bay of Fundy. So the Cape is an interesting place where things are happening very quickly.”

For instance there’s currently a push to cull the seal population with an eye toward reducing shark visits to Cape Cod.

“Seals are not a local population. The seal population is from Newfoundland to Long Island. A seal that is on Cape might be in Newfoundland in a couple of days,” MacFarlane said.

The Gulf of Maine waters are warming faster than the most of the rest of the Earth.

“Species are switching because of warmer waters. I liken it to throwing up a deck of cards and predicting how they’ll land. We don’t know what the water will look like in the future,” MacFarlane noted. “New species could catch up to this but how will they survive? Will they survive? Are they on the move? Is there going to be food for them? All these things are happening at a fast pace. It’s difficult to keep track of when we don’t know what the interactions of the species are anymore.”

And all of this is impacted by what’s gone on long ago. Right Whales are nearly extinct today because of whaling for fuel oil 200 years ago.

“There is a long standing history of how we dealt with natural resources as a whole. It goes back to the middle ages up till now and the factory ships in the 1960s and how we changed to the 200 mile limit and what that did. It’s a very complex story and I tried to write it for the general public. It should be something of interest for people who have any interest in the marine world. It’s the putting of all things in one place.”